His
name is Dorsen and he is one of an army of children, some just four
years old, working in the vast polluted mines of the Democratic Republic
of Congo, where toxic red dust burns their eyes, and they run the risk
of skin disease and a deadly lung condition. Here, for a wage of just 8p
a day, the children are made to check the rocks for the tell-tale
chocolate-brown streaks of cobalt – the prized ingredient essential for
the batteries that power electric cars.

And
it’s feared that thousands more children could be about to be dragged
into this hellish daily existence – after the historic pledge made by
Britain to ban the sale of petrol and diesel cars from 2040 and switch
to electric vehicles....

Dorsen,
just eight, is one of 40,000 children working daily in the mines of the
Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The terrible price they will pay
for our clean air is ruined health and a likely early death.

Almost
every big motor manufacturer striving to produce millions of electric
vehicles buys its cobalt from the impoverished central African state. It
is the world’s biggest producer, with 60 per cent of the planet’s
reserves.

The cobalt is mined by
unregulated labour and transported to Asia where battery manufacturers
use it to make their products lighter, longer-lasting and rechargeable.

The
planned [UK] switch to clean energy vehicles has led to an extraordinary
surge in demand. While a smartphone battery uses no more than 10 grams
of refined cobalt, an electric car needs 15kg (33lb).

Goldman Sachs, the merchant bank, calls
cobalt ‘the new gasoline’ but there are no signs of new wealth in the
DRC, where the children haul the rocks brought up from tunnels dug by
hand.

Adult miners dig up to 600ft
below the surface using basic tools, without protective clothing or
modern machinery. Sometimes the children are sent down into the narrow
makeshift chambers where there is constant danger of collapse.

Cobalt
is such a health hazard that it has a respiratory disease named after
it – cobalt lung, a form of pneumonia which causes coughing and leads to
permanent incapacity and even death. Even
simply eating vegetables grown in local soil can cause vomiting and
diarrhoea, thyroid damage and fatal lung diseases, while birds and fish
cannot survive in the area.

No one
knows quite how many children have died mining cobalt in the Katanga
region in the south-east of the country. The UN estimates 80 a year, but
many more deaths go unregistered, with the bodies buried in the rubble
of collapsed tunnels. Others survive but with chronic diseases which
destroy their young lives. Girls as young as ten in the mines are
subjected to sexual attacks and many become pregnant.

When Sky News investigated the Katanga
mines it found Dorsen, working near a little girl called Monica, who was
four, on a day of relentless rainfall.

Dorsen
was hauling heavy sacks of rocks from the mine surface to a growing
stack 60ft away. A full sack was lifted on to Dorsen’s head and he
staggered across to the stack. A brutish overseer stood over him,
shouting and raising his hand to threaten a beating if he spilt any.

With
his mother dead, Dorsen lives with his father in the bush and the two
have to work daily in the cobalt mine to earn money for food. Dorsen’s friend Richard, 11, said that at the end of a working day ‘everything hurts’.

In
a country devastated by civil wars in which millions have died, there
is no other way for families to survive. Britain’s Department for
International Development (DFID) is donating £10.5million between June
2007 and June 2018 towards strengthening revenue transparency and
encouraging responsible activity in large and small scale artisanal
mining, ‘to benefit the poor of DRC’.

There is little to show for these efforts
so far. There is a DRC law forbidding the enslavement of under-age
children, but nobody enforces it.

The
UN’s International Labour Organisation has described cobalt mining in
DRC as ‘one of the worst forms of child labour’ due to the health risks.

Soil
samples taken from the mining area by doctors at the University of
Lubumbashi, the nearest city, show the region to be among the ten most
polluted in the world. Residents near mines in southern DRC had urinary
concentrates of cobalt 43 higher than normal. Lead levels were five
times higher, cadmium and uranium four times higher.

The
worldwide rush to bring millions of electric vehicles on to our roads
has handed a big advantage to those giant car-makers which saw this
bonanza coming and invested in developing battery-powered vehicles,
among them General Motors, Renault-Nissan, Tesla, BMW and Fiat-Chrysler.

Chinese middle-men working for the Congo
Dongfang Mining Company have the stranglehold in DRC, buying the raw
cobalt brought to them in sacks carried on bicycles and dilapidated old
cars daily from the Katanga mines. They sit in shacks on a dusty road
near the Zambian border, offering measly sums scrawled on blackboards
outside – £40 for a ton of cobalt-rich rocks – that will be sent by
cargo ship to minerals giant Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt in China and sold on
to a complex supply chain feeding giant multinationals.

Challenged
by the Washington Post about the appalling conditions in the mines,
Huayou Cobalt said ‘it would be irresponsible’ to stop using child
labour, claiming: ‘It could aggravate poverty in the cobalt mining
regions and worsen the livelihood of local miners.’

Human
rights charity Amnesty International also investigated cobalt mining in
the DRC and says that none of the 16 electric vehicle manufacturers
they identified have conducted due diligence to the standard defined by
the Responsible Cobalt Initiative.

Encouragingly, Apple, which uses the
mineral in its devices, has committed itself to treat cobalt like
conflict minerals – those which have in the past funded child soldiers
in the country’s civil war –and the company claims it is going to
require all refiners to have supply chain audits and risk assessments.
But Amnesty International is not satisfied. ‘This promise is not worth
the paper it is written on when the companies are not investigating
their suppliers,’ said Amnesty’s Mark Dummett. ‘Big brands have the
power to change this.’

After DRC,
Australia is the next biggest source of cobalt, with reserves of
1million tons, followed by Cuba, China, Russia, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

After the terrible plight of
Dorsen and Richard was broadcast in a report on Sky News, an emotive
response from viewers funded a rescue by children’s charity Kimbilio.
They are now living in a church-supported children’s home, sleeping on
mattresses for the first time in their lives and going to school.